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Oncology drug development and discovery supported by hundreds of employees around the world

Paula Swain is Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Incyte Corporation, a pharmaceutical company based in Wilmington, Delaware. Founded in Palo Alto, California in 1991, Incyte has grown into a $1.5 billion firm that employs hundreds of people and serves patients around the world. Incyte’s pharmaceutical products and research are focused on innovative solutions in oncology therapy. The company’s flagship drug, Jakafi (Ruxolitinib), has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of a bone marrow cancer known as myelofibrosis, as well as polycythemia vera.

EDWIN WARFIELD: As EVP of HR, how do you ensure your department supports Incyte? I would imagine that talent recruitment is extremely competitive.

PAULA SWAIN: I was able to build the function from the ground up here at Incyte. I describe our HR function as a high-touch HR function. We’re bucking the trends. A lot of HR departments have websites, and you call an 800 number if you have a question, or go online and look for your answer. We’re pretty high-touch, and so employees stop by my office all the time to ask me, “Well, how do I get this reimbursed?” Or, “What’s this on our insurance plan.” We want people to interact with us, and so we put together a very attractive benefits package so that people are well taken care of—they’re well compensated—but they also have great benefits. We try to think about: “How can we make employees’ lives easier?”

It’s very competitive; pharmaceuticals is a very competitive industry, and you have to figure out how to set yourself apart. One way is to do that is to have creative science, and so people want to work here because of that, but what keeps them there are good policies, good practices, the personalization—that people aren’t numbers. And we’ve gotten a bit bigger—we have people in Europe, we’ve just started an operation in Japan—but we still feel like we’re a small company. We’re 1200 people—we’re not that large but we’re a lot larger than we were. From an HR perspective, I think what keeps people with us is that ability to feel like they’re making a contribution. And that’s how you recruit top talent and that’s how you retain them.

Q. Your tenure at the company precedes the arrival of Hervé Hoppenot, who joined as CEO in 2014. How would you describe his leadership style and what it’s like working with him?

A. Hervé is someone who is highly creative, highly strategic, very knowledgeable in the oncology space. He spent almost his entire career in the oncology space, which is unusual. In every company he’s worked in, he’s been in oncology. He is strategically 10 steps ahead of everyone. When he joined the company, we were pretty small and we were Delaware-based, pretty happy with the way the organization was, but when he came in, he laid out things that he saw, that he thought would be important for us to do. One was to expand beyond just the US—look at expansion into Europe and Japan. He talked a lot about technical operations, looking at potentially manufacturing our own products, which we currently don’t do. That was another initiative that he put in place. We have a small group looking at non-oncology products, and so he made that a separate unit that we call our “advanced medicines unit.” He really has strategically positioned us in a way that will allow us to grow and become self-sufficient and continue to grow as an independent company.

Q. Tell us about the charitable giving program you launched at Incyte.

A. One of the things when Hervé first got there—we talked a lot about what was missing from the company, and I told him that one of the things that I felt we were missing was not having a very robust philanthropy program. He thought it was a great idea and said, “let’s create a foundation.” What we basically created was what we call Incyte Involved. Incyte Involved is a three-pronged program. One is the Charitable Giving Foundation where we distribute about $500,000 a year to charitable organizations within Delaware only, so we establish that money has to be used in Delaware. Two categories: one is to help cancer patients, organizations that help cancer patients we make donations to, and also community need, so there’s the two buckets of money that we distribute. The second part of that is that we give each employee a volunteer day off, so they get eight hours each year to volunteer at one of the organizations of their choice, and a lot of times it’s to someone that we’ve made a grant to. That helps get our employees out into the community. The third piece is that we have a matching gifts program where, up to $1,000 a year, we match whatever our employees give. We’ve linked the three together, so that we have grants that we’re making, we’re trying to get our employees to volunteer time, and then to give donation, so that it’s all an integrated program. And at a time when a lot of the funding within the state has been reduced for charitable organizations, it’s made a big impact. As we’ve had other employers moving out, it’s helped to fill a bit of a void. It’s probably one of the most rewarding parts of my job, to be able to interact with these organizations and see the good work that’s being done throughout our communities.

Connect with Paula on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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